Critics say a new U.S. Senate amendment would gravely chill efforts to shine a light into government’s darkest corners by making it easier to slap certain leakers of homeland security information with a decade behind bars.

U.S. Sen. John Kyl of Arizona, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee’s Terrorism, Technology & Homeland Security Subcommittee, initially pitched a more sweeping amendment to a bill dealing with federal data mining efforts. It would have broadened statutes prohibiting unauthorized disclosure or publication of classified information “concerning efforts by the United States to identify, investigate, or prevent terrorist activity,” and would have made such leaks punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Reporting by The Washington Post, The New York Times and dozens of other media outlets in recent years almost certainly would have qualified. A coalition of civil liberties and free press groups protested Feb. 27 to the Judiciary Committee, and Kyl killed his amendment the next day.

But on March 2 he introduced a retooled version of the amendment for attachment to S.4, a bill that would enact the 9/11 Commission’s remaining recommendations. The amendment’s new version would penalize House and Senate members and staffers, or anyone else, who knowingly discloses classified information from reports to Congress required under three anti-terror laws.

Kyl’s office didnt return calls or an e-mail inquiring about the amendment this week.

The Sunshine in Government Initiative, a coalition of media groups, was among organizations that complained about Kyl’s earlier proposal, likening it to Britain’s Official Secrets Act. It’s not fond of the new proposal, either.

“Our fear is that it’s going to chill communications between government and the media,” initiative coordinator Rick Blum said this week. “This is a real threat to the careful balance that’s been struck over the past few decades between the press and the government.”

Blum said the amendment covers, by his count, any of 28 reports made to Congress each year under the Patriot ACT and other homeland security laws.

“The information contained in those reports address a wide range of security issues, … and reporters report on this stuff every single day,” Blum said. “So this is very broad, very sweeping, and it lowers the thresholds for prosecuting somebody for discussing this information. … Prosecutors would not have to show harm or the intent to show harm; they would just have to show the information was published ‘in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States.'”

Georgetown University Law School professor David Vladeck, an expert in open government law, said he thinks it’s “a spoiler amendment” offered by Kyl to poison the 9/11 Commission bill. “I don’t think he believes that his amendment is going to become law. I think he’s using it for strategic purposes to derail legislation that neither he nor the White House want to see reach the president’s desk.”

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